Reinventing Farming

We know that large-scale farming as it exists today presents all sorts of problems, ranging from the mass-producing scale to soil and resource depletion. Which is why Wes Jackson's work at the Land Institute is so important: he and his team are working on ways to fix what climate change and population increases have done to our food supply.

In this story from NPR, Jackson points out that we need to fix the world's food problems, and the solution is a resilient food system — which we do not have currently.

Soil that is replanted year after year loses its nutrients (those of you who have read up about Joel Salatin's farm will be familiar with that concept), and that's exactly the problem Jackson's team is trying to combat. They're doing it by cross-breeding perennial native grasses (grasses that come up every year) with wheat, to see if they can develop a plant that needs only be planted once.